Trade in services related to intangibles and the profit shifting hypothesis
利用意大利企业调查数据，分析知识产权相关服务贸易是否被跨国公司用作向避税地转移利润的渠道，发现整体相关性很低，但少数企业存在正相关。
This paper focuses on the international trade in services related to intangible assets and intellectual property products (IPP), and it explores to what extent they might be used as a channel to shift the profits of multinational firms to tax havens. Using survey data on Italian firms, we first provide a geographical and sectoral analysis of Italy's trade in IPP services. We then estimate the amount of profit shifted abroad by foreign‐owned firms in our sample, applying at various levels of aggregation a methodology recently put forward in the literature. Finally, we look for a correlation at the firm level between estimated shifted profits and imports of IPP services. We find that while the overall correlation is very low, there is a small cluster of firms displaying a positive correlation between these two variables.